The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization [1 ed.] 0815359454, 9780815359456

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The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization

This is the first handbook to provide a comprehensive coverage of the main approaches that theorize translation and globalization, offering a wide-ranging selection of chapters dealing with substantive areas of research. The handbook investigates the many ways in which translation both enables globalization and is inevitably transformed by it. Taking a genuinely interdisciplinary approach, the authors are leading researchers drawn from the social sciences, as well as from translation studies. The chapters cover major areas of current interdisciplinary interest, including climate change, migration, borders, democracy and human rights, as well as key topics in the discipline of translation studies. This handbook also highlights the increasing significance of translation in the most pressing social, economic and political issues of our time, while accounting for the new technologies and practices that are currently deployed to cope with growing translation demands. With five sections covering key concepts, people, culture, economics and politics, and a substantial introduction and conclusion, this handbook is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation and globalization within translation and interpreting studies, comparative literature, sociology, global studies, cultural studies and related areas. Esperança Bielsa is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Her research is in the areas of cultural sociology, social theory, translation, globalization and cosmopolitanism. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism and Translation and The Latin American Urban Crónica, and co-author of Translation in Global News. Dionysios Kapsaskis is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton, UK, where he teaches translation theory and audiovisual translation. His interests and publications are in the areas of comparative literature, translation and film. He is also a specialized translator and film subtitler into Greek.

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies provide comprehensive overviews of the key topics in translation and interpreting studies. All entries for the handbooks are specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and carefully edited, Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies are the ideal resource for both advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy Edited by Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics Edited by Rebecca Tipton and Louisa Desilla The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Technology Edited by Minako O'Hagan The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education Edited by Sara Laviosa and Maria González-Davies The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Cognition Edited by Fabio Alves and Arnt Lykke Jakobsen The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism Edited by Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender Edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization Edited by Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics Edited by Kaisa Koskinen and Nike K. Pokorn

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeHandbooks-in-Translation-and-Interpreting-Studies/book-series/RHTI.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization

Edited by Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bielsa, Esperança, 1971– editor. | Kapsaskis, Dionysios, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of translation and globalization / edited by Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis. Description: London; New York: Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge handbooks in translation and interpreting studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020029690 | ISBN 9780815359456 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003121848 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting. | Translating and interpreting—Social aspects. | Globalization—Social aspects. Classification: LCC P306.2 .R67 2020 | DDC 418/.02—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029690 ISBN: 978-0-815-35945-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12184-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures List of tables Notes on contributors

ix x xi

Introduction: the intersection between translation and globalization Esperança Bielsa

1

PART I

Key concepts

11

1 Translation encounters and the histories of globalization David Inglis and Christopher Thorpe

13

2 Multiple and entangled modernities, cosmopolitanism and translation Gerard Delanty

27

3 The individuality of language: internationality and transnationality Naoki Sakai

39

4 Translation and inequality Paul F. Bandia

55

5 Translation and geography: the globe and the Western spatial imagination Federico Italiano

71

6 Translation and climate change Michael Cronin

85

7 The internationalization of translation studies Jorge Jiménez-Bellver

99

v

Contents

8 Transnational and global approaches in translation studies: methodological observations Mattea Cussel

113

PART II

People 9 Translation and the semiotics of migrants’ visibility Moira Inghilleri

129 131 147

161

176



190



202

PART III

Culture

217

219

230



251

265

vi

Contents



278



293



306

PART IV

Economics

321



323



337



351



363



375

391 406

PART V

Politics

425



427



441

vii

Contents



455



469

­

483



498



513

Conclusion: paradoxes at the intersection of translation and globalization Dionysios Kapsaskis

528

Index

535

viii

Figures

11.1 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 25.1 26.1 28.1 28.2 28.3

Representation of the model of analysis Top five source languages Distribution of the six UN languages as source languages (SL) Top five target languages Respective shares of the six UN languages (TL) The ecosystem of language services and technology Different areas of research in localization studies Screenshot from TM town page ‘10 reasons to upload your prior work to TM town’ T WB – In the words of our volunteers Words translated counter on TWB’s homepage

163 232 234 235 235 365 380 408 409 412

ix

Tables

16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 16.5 16.6 16.7 16.8 16.9 16.10 16.11 16.12 16.13 16.14 16.15 16.16 25.1 25.2 25.3

x

Top 20 source languages Speakers of the world’s languages (L1) 2017 Top 20 target languages Translating country and subject of books translated from English to French Origin of French to English translations UN languages (TL): subjects Non-European supercentral languages (TL): subjects Origin of translations from Turkish (SL) Hindi and Urdu Malay Malay (TL): subjects Swahili and Hausa Russian translations into swahili: subjects (1979–1991) Russian (TL): subjects before and after 1991 Mandarin SL (1979–1989) Mandarin (SL) to minority languages of China (1979–1989) Changing ecosystem demographics that will drive language industry growth Technology platform changes that will drive language industry growth Challenges faced by the language sector

232 233 234 236 237 238 239 240 240 240 241 241 242 242 243 244 367 369 372

Contributors

Elisa Alonso  is Lecturer and Researcher in Translation Studies at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain, where she currently teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her research interests include the impacts of technology on sociological aspects of translation and on translator training. Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University, USA. He is founding editor of Translation and Interpreting Studies and co-editor of the book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation. His recent publications include Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature and Queer Theory and Translation Studies. Mona Baker is Professor Emerita of Translation Studies at the University of Manchester, UK and Director of the Baker Centre for Translation  & Intercultural Studies, Shanghai International Studies University. She is co-coordinator of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network, author of Translation and Conflict and editor of Translating Dissent. Paul F. Bandia is Professor of Translation Studies in the Department of French at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. His interests include translation history and theory, orality, post- colonialism, decolonization, interculturality, transmigration, literary heterolingualism and multilingualism. He also studies linguistic, literary and cultural encounters between the Global South and the Global North. Salah Basalamah is Associate Professor at the School of Translation and Interpretation, University of Ottawa, Canada. His fields of research include the philosophy of translation, translation rights and ethics, social and political philosophy, postcolonial, cultural and religious studies. He is the author of Le droit de traduire. Une politique culturelle pour la mondialisation (2009). Esperança Bielsa  is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Her research is in the areas of cultural sociology, social theory, translation, globalization and cosmopolitanism. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism and Translation and The Latin American Urban Crónica, and co-author of Translation in Global News. Michał Borodo  is Assistant Professor at the Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. He has published on various topics in translation studies and his main research interests include translation in the context of globalization and glocalization, the translation of children’s and young adults’ literature, the translation of comics, and translator training.

xi

Contributors

Annie Brisset  is Professor Emerita of Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research focusses on sociocriticism and the sociology of translation. A former consultant to UNESCO on translation-related projects, she is a founding member and past president of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies and a member of the Royal Society of Canada. M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera is an Associate Professor at the School of Philology and Translation and Interpreting of the University of Vigo, Spain. Her research focusses on translation in relation to socio-political and intellectual frameworks vis-à-vis the concept of cultural mobility, and on transnationalism, foreignness and silence in Modernism and contemporary Irish fiction. Raúl E. Colón Rodríguez has a PhD in Translation Studies and is a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa. With complexity theory as the main theoretical approach, his research centres around three topics: translation of theories, collaborative activist translation and world translation flows. Michael Cronin is 1776 Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin and Director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation. He is an elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Academia Europaea and is an Honorary Member of the Irish Translators and Interpreters Association. He is editor of the Routledge New Perspectives series in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Mattea Cussel is Teaching Fellow and Predoctoral Researcher at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She has studied Latin American Studies and Translation Studies and is currently researching a PhD on US Latina/o migration stories and their translation and reception. Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His most recent publication is Critical Theory and Social Transformation ( Routledge, 2020). Other publications include: The Cosmopolitan Imagination (2009), Formations of European Modernity, 2nd edition (2019), Community, 3rd edition (2018), and The European Heritage: A Critical ReInterpretation (2018). Donald A. DePalma is the founder of CSA Research, a market firm in localization and globalization. Prior to CSA, he co-founded Interbase Software, was vice president of corporate strategy at Idiom Technologies and analyst at Forrester Research. Don holds a doctorate in Slavic linguistics ( Brown University) and is the author of Business Without Borders (2004). Tine Destrooper is an Associate Professor at the Human Rights Centre of the Faculty of Law and Criminology at Ghent University. Her research focusses on the contextualization of human rights norms, particularly in post- conflict settings. Together with Sally Merry, she recently edited the volume Human Rights Transformation in Practice. ˇ urovicˇová edits the book series and electronic publications of the International Nataša D Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and teaches in the MFA programme in Literary Translation there. She has also co-edited World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (2010) and At Translation’s Edge (2019). xii

Contributors

Federico M. Federici  is a Professor of Intercultural Crisis Communication at the Centre for Translation Studies, University College London. His research currently focusses on translators and interpreters as intercultural mediators, online translated news and the study of translation in crises. Fruela Fernández is Lecturer in English Studies at Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain. He is the author of Translating the Crisis: Politics and Culture in Spain after the 15M (Routledge) and Espacios de dominación, espacios de resistencia ( Peter Lang), as well as co- editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics. Paola Gentile is a postdoctoral researcher and adjunct professor of Dutch at the University of Trieste. She holds a MA in conference interpreting and in 2016 she obtained her PhD in Interpreting and Translation at the University of Trieste. Her research interests are: the sociology of translation and interpreting, the reception of translated literature and imagology. Leah Gerber is a senior lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Studies programme at Monash University. Her research concentrates on literary and cultural translation, with a focus on Australian children’s texts and their translation into German. Leah is also the current Editor of the literary translation journal The AALITRA Review. Moira Inghilleri is Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include translation and migration, sociological approaches to translation and interpreting research, ethics, and translation and conflict. She is the author of Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language (2012) and Translation and Migration (2016). David Inglis  is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki. He writes in the areas of cultural sociology, the sociology of globalization, historical sociology, and social theory, both modern and classical. He has written and edited, most recently, An Invitation to Social Theory (2nd edition), The Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology and The Globalization of Wine. Federico Italiano is Senior Researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer in Comparative Literature at LMU Munich. His recent publications include Translation and Geography (Routledge, 2016), Grand Tour (with Jan Wagner, Hanser, 2019) and The Dark Side of Translation ( Routledge, 2020). An Italian poet and translator, Federico has published five poetry collections. Rada Ivekovic’, philosopher, born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1945, taught at the Philosophy Department of Zagreb University, at the Universities of Paris-7, Paris- 8, and the Collège international de philosophie, Paris ( Programme director 2004–2010). She works on political philosophy (nation, state, gender, migration, violence, partition, ( post)colony), Indian philosophy, feminist theory and translation. Jorge Jiménez-Bellver is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa. He earned his BA in English and his MA in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Alicante. He also earned an MA in Comparative Literature ( Translation Studies Track) from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. xiii

Contributors

Miguel A. Jiménez-Crespo is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Rutgers University. He is the author of Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translations: Expanding the Limits of Translation Studies ( John Benjamins) and Translation and Web Localization ( Routledge). He has been the editor of the Journal of Internationalization and Localization ( JIAL). Dionysios Kapsaskis is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton, London, where he teaches translation theory and audiovisual translation. His interests and publications are in the areas of comparative literature, translation and film. He is also a specialized translator and film subtitler into Greek. David Katan is Full Professor of English Studies and Translation at the University of Salento (Italy), and Visiting Professor at the University of South Africa. He is currently combining his experience in tourism translation (museum panels and tourist guides) with his research on cultural mediation, insider- outsider asymmetries and transcreation. Alice Leal is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Vienna. Her recent publications include chapters in the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy and in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Her new book, English and Translation in the EU after Brexit, is coming out in 2021 ( Routledge). Joss Moorkens is an Assistant Professor at Dublin City University and Funded Investigator at the ADAPT Centre. He has authored over 50 articles, book chapters and conference papers on translation topics, is General Co-Editor of Translation Spaces and sits on the board of the European Masters in Translation network. Robert Neather is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. His research interests include museum translation and collaborative translation, particularly in the Chinese context. He has published in a variety of venues including Meta, Semiotica and The Translator. Siri Nergaard teaches at the University of South-Eastern Norway, and at the University of Florence, Italy. In addition to numerous articles, Nergaard is the author and editor of several books in Italian on translation studies. Forthcoming is the book Translation and Transmigration. Nergaard is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal. Lucas Nunes Vieira is a Lecturer in Translation Studies with Technology at the University of Bristol. He researches the use of machine translation in human translation practices and how this affects processes, products and attitudes. Marc Orlando is Associate Professor and Director of the Translation and Interpreting programme at Macquarie University. His work focusses on practice-led research applied to the training of translators and interpreters and on the synergies between academic research, professional practice and T&I didactics. He is an active conference interpreter. Attila Piróth is a freelance translator and the coordinator of Solidarités International’s translation internship programme. He has translated works of Albert Einstein, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn into Hungarian. He is the founder and director of Théâtre le Levain, a small independent theatre in Bègles, France. xiv

Contributors

Naoki Sakai is Goldwin Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Cornell University. He has published in comparative literature, intellectual history, translation studies, and so on. His publications include Translation and Subjectivity (1997), Voices of the Past (1991) and The End of Pax Americana and Inward-looking Society (in press). Claire Scammell is a translator/editor with ten years’ professional experience. Her doctoral research, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and completed at King’s College London, examined readers’ responses to translations in global news. She is the author of the book Translation Strategies in Global News: What Sarkozy Said in the Suburbs. Christopher Thorpe is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Exeter. His areas of expertise include classical and modern social theory and cultural sociology. His forthcoming monograph with Routledge is entitled British Representations of Italy: A Cultural Sociological History. Ira Torresi is Associate Professor in the Department of Interpreting and Translation ( DIT) of the University of Bologna at Forlì. Her main interests are advertising translation, Child Language Brokering, James Joyce in translation, gender and advertising, all approached through visual and social semiotics as well as translation studies. Maria Tymoczko is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a leading theorist of translation and an expert in translation studies. Her research areas also include Medieval Studies and Modernism including the work of James Joyce. Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte  is Professor of Translation at the University of Salamanca, Spain. She has published 14 books, 12 anthologies and over a hundred essays on translation theory, post-colonialism, gender and geo-politics. She is a practising translator specialized in the fields of philosophy, literature and contemporary art.

xv

Introduction The intersection between translation and globalization1 Esperança Bielsa

Globalization is no longer the magic buzzword that at the turn of this century suddenly seemed indispensable to grasp the contemporary world and its challenges, although few people quite knew how to specify or define. The concept was in everybody’s mouth ( politicians, journalists and activists, not just academics, embraced it), and this ubiquity, as well as its wide-ranging but imprecise meanings, led some to remark that globalization was in danger of becoming the cliché of our times (Held et  al. 1999: 1). It was this very dynamism that fostered the booming of interdisciplinary globalization theory and the constitution of a now firmly established new research domain: global studies. Overly economistic approaches that viewed globalization largely in terms of the liberalization of world markets were soon complemented with more multi- d imensional accounts that identified a complex of distinct social, cultural, economic and political aspects; studies of these objective characteristics of globalization were joined by research that focused on its subjective dimensions; early views of globalization as homogenization were challenged by more nuanced accounts that identified the significance of widespread processes of localization and hybridization; a long history of globalization that went back to at least the great empires of antiquity was investigated, and the methodological nationalism that prevailed in social scientific and humanistic disciplines was exposed. As we enter the third decade of the t wenty-first century, the dynamism that once nourished new understandings of the global seems to have vanished, as self-reflexive accounts of our lack of understanding gain ground. Some of the most interesting recent approaches to globalization precisely elaborate on the increasing opacity of the global as one of its fundamental features. For Chris Rumford, globalization leads not only to the realization that we live in a smaller, deeply interconnected world but also to an increasing sense of strangeness, as the social world becomes unrecognizable in many ways and familiar reference points are eroded ( Rumford 2013). Ulrich Beck elaborates in his last, posthumously published book an attempt to describe how the world has metamorphosed into a substantially new reality we no longer understand ( Beck 2016). Moreover, in contemporary politics globalization and globalism have become the object of widespread opposition and rejection, most visible in the Trump government and the new right, an a nti-g lobalism that in time will prove to be

1

Esperança Bielsa

as misplaced as the contrasting optimism that lead to beliefs of globalization as the end of history in the 1990s. What has recently been described as a globalization backlash (Crouch 2019) has led globalization theorists to reexamine the significance and character of globalization processes that not so long ago seemed unquestionable. Thus, attempts have been made to respond to current deglobalization claims by providing explanations of why and how globalization continues to matter even when the world has come to doubt its purpose and relevance (Steger and James 2019: 19). In their book, Manfred Steger and Paul James tackle new global challenges such as populism and the current political and cultural dimensions of climate change while reaffirming the continuing significance of intensifying globalization processes. It is not just that deglobalization arguments that show a relative decline in the movement of people and objects across the world miss the growing significance of ‘disembodied globalization’, defined as the extension of social relations through the movement of immaterial things and processes (Steger and James 2019: 122) – or what Jan Aart Scholte differently approached as new forms of ‘transworld simultaneity’ and ‘transworld instantaneity’ to designate the largescale spread of supraterritoriality in contemporary globalization (Scholte 2005: 60– 64). In fact, the very position that allows the articulation of deglobalizing perspectives presupposes intensifying globalization and the internalization of globality to such a high degree that it becomes no longer visible. An interruption of the now so much taken for granted and assumed normality of global interconnectedness, relationality and mobility, such as that created by the pandemic of Covid-19 in 2020, challenges its invisibility and suddenly awakens us to the pervasiveness of this existing reality. A somewhat similar argument can be made with respect to the significance of theoretical and empirical approaches to globalization in translation studies. Michael Cronin’s seminal book Translation and Globalization (2003) was soon followed by other contributions that tackled the intersection between globalization and translation from an interdisciplinary perspective and empirically examined some key areas such as news or political violence ( Bassnett et  al. 2005; Bielsa 2007; Bielsa and Bassnett 2009; Bielsa and Hugues 2009). However, if globalization theory was seen to have mainly ignored the key mediating role that translation plays in global connectivity and the movement of people and information around the world ( Bielsa 2005), it must also be said that translation studies has remained rather unconcerned about relevant developments in global studies. But this relative lack of interdisciplinary engagement should not blind us to the deep transformations that current understandings of globalization have brought about in the field of translation studies. Contemporary globalization has changed how we approach translation and the work of translation scholars profoundly. Within the so-called cultural turn ( Bassnett and Lefevere 1990), characterized by the emergence of new concerns to investigate the social and cultural contexts that condition translation and are inevitably transformed by it, it has contributed to a renewal of the discipline and added a wealth of new topics and viewpoints to translation research, of which this handbook seeks to offer a representative sample. Such a reorientation is a precondition for the much expected translational turn ( Bachmann-Medick 2009) in the humanities and the social sciences. The present conjuncture is precisely what makes the production of this handbook possible as a first but already feasible attempt to bring together the wealth of scholarship that is currently investigating the effects of globalization on all forms of translation and conceptualizing the role of translation in a global context. In the two last decades, globalization has become an inescapable aspect of all areas of translation research. Globalization has become normal. By explicitly identifying and describing how it has shaped translation in the most 2

Introduction

diverse social contexts, from tourism and migration to politics within and beyond the state, this handbook shows the contribution of translation studies to globalization scholarship and debate. Moreover, in the present phase of globalization, variously approached by scholars as the uncertainty phase ( Robertson 1992: 59) or ‘the great unsettling’ (Steger and James 2019: 157–162), translation is bound to increase its significance, as abstracted or disembodied connectivity comes to play a bigger role when compared to more traditional forms of movement of people and objects across world space. As Steger and James point out, ‘the defining dominant condition of contemporary globalization is the movement of abstracted capital and culture  – including words, images, electronic texts, or encoded capital and cryptocurrencies – through processes of disembodied interchange’ (Steger and James 2019: 255). Many of these forms of disembodied connectivity are only made possible by the shared languages and linguistic competencies that are a key, if sometimes forgotten, infrastructure of intercultural communication and interaction ( Held et al. 1999: 345). In this context, and in face of the homogenizing ambition of English and of the idiom of neoliberalism, the question of translation acquires a new urgency ( Venn 2006: 82), not just for translation scholars but for the humanities and the social sciences more widely. There is a need to specify the complexities involved in negotiating cultural and linguistic difference and to examine the centrality of translation in constantly producing and reproducing the global reality that shapes our lives. This handbook emerges from the combined effort to account for the role of translation in making possible global connectedness and to chart the disciplinary changes that a global focus brings to translation studies. With respect to the first objective, it offers w ide-ranging interdisciplinary perspectives on the phenomenon of translation, incorporating accounts from authors in other disciplinary fields in the social sciences and the humanities on some key topics that include the history of globalization ( Inglis and Thorpe), multiple modernities and cosmopolitanism ( Delanty), literature (Caneda- Cabrera), cinema ( Ďurovičová), human rights ( Destrooper), democracy ( Bielsa) and the politics of translation (Iveković), as well as contributions from translation scholars that examine areas of interdisciplinary interest like geography ( Italiano), migration ( Inghilleri), world translation flows ( Brisset and Colón), authorship ( Basalamah), museums ( Neather) or the EU ( Leal). With respect to the second objective, that is, that of charting significant changes in translation studies brought about by a consistently global focus, it gathers contributions that approach translation primarily from a transnational perspective, rather than a national one. A transnational perspective emphasizes interconnections across existing borders and illuminates translation’s key role in mediating between different localities and between the local and the global. While only a few chapters extensively focus on this significant dimension, most notably, Naoki Sakai’s approach to internationality and Mattea Cussel’s critique of methodological nationalism, the transnational perspective informs all the chapters gathered in this volume. Both interdisciplinarity and the transnational perspective are essential to the contribution that this handbook seeks to make to current scholarship on the intersection between translation and globalization through a coherent general approach that provides a common framework for all chapters, in spite of the diversity of authorial contributions and thematic scope. In addition, we wish to draw attention to the following significant issues that animate current scholarship, and which we have sought to represent in this volume, described below.

A plurality of understandings of both translation and globalization Both translation studies and global studies are home to lively debates on how to define the very basic concepts from which they originate. In translation studies, more traditional 3

Esperança Bielsa

definitions of translation as interlinguistic transfer can be contrasted with views that seek to foreground translation as a social relation with otherness that leaves neither the text nor the translator unchanged. On the other hand, the concept of cultural translation has been developed to underscore the significance of the wider cultural relations involved in translation and is used especially by authors in other disciplines (who implicitly take translation to signify a strictly linguistic process in more narrow terms), but has also had some repercussion within the field of translation studies itself. There is always something that seems to defy a comprehensive grasp of translation as a research object, a quality of translation that remains obdurately evasive, and it is precisely from this fact that fruitful speculations about the significance of metaphors of translation originate. It is important to note that similar debates regarding the concept of globalization and its basic periodization have characterized the field of global studies since its inception, a fact to which translation scholars have tended to remain oblivious. David Inglis and Christopher Thorpe’s chapter describes the widespread disagreements concerning what globalization is and when it began, and their attitude of keeping ‘an open mind about such matters’ is echoed in the more general position of this handbook with respect to fundamental disagreements about the basic concepts of translation and globalization. Inglis and Thorpe’s chapter also brings into focus the significance of translation in the early history of globalization, while Paul Bandia traces the historical relations between the global South and the global North in the context of colonialism, postcolonialism and neo- colonialism.

Translation in its most diverse forms and contexts Globalization reveals the existing diversity of forms and types of translation, as well as its widespread significance in different social domains. Moreover, this is not just a contemporary feature, but one that is deeply ingrained in the role of translation through history. Since antiquity, uses of translation as a means of cultural appropriation coexist with the intervention of translation in processes of conquest and religious conversion. Contemporary globalization has greatly aided to the growing visibility of widely significant forms of translation in the media, which have led to the development of new subfields and areas of specialized research in translation studies, such as audiovisual translation and news translation. This handbook seeks to represent the existing diversity of forms of translation in all types of social connections and relations across linguistic borders and to analyze its intervention in contemporary culture, economics and politics. With respect to culture, the translation of literature (chapters by Brisset and Colón, Caneda- Cabrera), global news (Scammell) and cinema ( Ďurovičová), as well as translation in museums ( Neather) are examined. In economic terms, while translation has become a major global industry ( DePalma) and tourism, advertising and promotional translation have flourished alongside global trade ( Katan, Torresi), widespread localization processes ( Jimenez- Crespo, Scammell) illustrate the local-g lobal dynamics that are an inherent feature of globalization, which not only penetrates localities from the outside but is also deeply shaped at the local level, a process well captured by the notion of glocalization. Economic aspects of translation and employment conditions of translators and interpreters are also inextricably bound with major political and technological developments, such as the impact of neoliberalism (Moorkens) and the rise of the platform economy ( Piróth and Baker). Perhaps the topic that has received more critical attention beyond translation studies is the growing visibility and significance of translation for politics beyond the state (see, for instance, Santos 2005; Balibar 2006; Doerr 2018). In this light, the handbook contains chapters on democracy ( Bielsa), human rights ( Destrooper), the EU ( Leal), political 4

Introduction

activism ( Fernández) and feminist ethics (Iveković), which address how translation relates to the new political landscapes brought about by globalization. At the same time, the continuing significance of nations ( Baer) and borders ( Vidal), as well as constitutive and mounting gender, ethnic and national violence (Iveković), are also distinctive features of the present where translation is called to play a key political role. Globalization has also impacted on the nature of the discipline, confronting mainly Western views of translation with other conceptualizations and leading to what Jorge Jimenez-Bellver describes in terms of the internationalization of translation studies. This is a dimension that is also explored, in different ways, in chapters by Maria Tymoczko and Paul Bandia, who coincide in noting the paradox that emerges when globalization opens up new understandings of translation while, at the same time, enforcing and augmenting fundamental asymmetries and inequalities.

The role of technology In addition to the diversity of understandings concerning the very basic terms that define them as academic disciplines, as indicated above, translation studies and global studies have another interesting similarity: the need to account for the central role of technology in making possible the current phase of globalization, which differs from earlier forms in significant ways, and the widespread changes that translation has undergone in recent decades. Arguably, one of the best approaches to the role of technology in contemporary globalization is Manuel Castells’s groundbreaking conception of informational capitalism. For Castells, contemporary globalization is linked primarily to the revolution in information technologies of the 1970s, which became the motor for the expansion and rejuvenation of capitalism at the end of the twentieth century, just as the steam engine was the motor of the first industrial revolution. Informationalism, based on knowledge, is for Castells the base of the socio- economic restructuring of the 1980s that gave rise to the network society. Significantly, Castells distinguishes between the notions of ‘ information society’ and ‘ informational society’. While the former underlines the role of information in society, in contrast, the term ‘ informational’ indicates the attribute of a specific form of social organization in which information generation, processing, and transmission become the fundamental sources of productivity and power because of new technological conditions emerging in this historical period. (Castells 2000: 21) Castells thus uses ‘ informational’ in a similar manner as ‘ industrial’: an industrial society refers not just to a society where there is industry, but to a society where the social and technological forms of industrial organization permeate all spheres of activity. The information technology revolution in the last quarter of the twentieth century provided the indispensable basis for the creation of the new economy, informational capitalism, where there is a historical linkage between the k nowledge-information base of the economy, its global reach, and its network-based organizational form. In this new technological paradigm, information itself has become the key product, the raw material upon which technologies act as they become the new base or material foundation of the network society. In previous technological revolutions information acted on technology; in the current context, fundamentally, technology also acts on information (2000: 70). As Castells explains, the informational economy does not oppose the logic of the industrial economy, but rather takes 5

Esperança Bielsa

it to a completely new level through technological deepening in all processes of material production and distribution (2000: 100). A key aspect of this transformation is the constitution of a global economy, which is a historically new reality. If a world economy had existed for centuries through transatlantic networks of commodity production and exchange established in the early modern period of Western expansion, a global economy, which Castells defines as ‘an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time, or chosen time, on a planetary scale’ (2000: 101), was only made possible by the new infrastructure provided by information and communication technologies. It is thus its supraterritorial character that determines this historically novel aspect of contemporary globalization. Yet if, as Castells argues, in the t wenty-fi rst century information has become the new raw material, the confrontation of human translators with machine translation today resembles the struggle of workers against machines that took place during the industrial revolution, as described by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century, in some fundamental ways. First, informational capitalism has turned translation, which had until recently remained a persistently artisanal activity, into an industry of massive scaling possibilities. An illustration of the dynamics that shape the shift from artisanal, to industrial, to platform economy is found in Attila Piróth and Mona Baker’s analysis of the case of Translation Without Borders. Second, this process is characterized by the devaluation of human labor, in this case the labor of translators and interpreters in the informational economy. ‘The devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things’, indicated Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1992: 323–324, original emphasis). The mature Marx would analyze in Capital the concrete effects of machine production on workers in terms of the incorporation of women and children into factory work, the prolongation of the working day and the intensification of labor. In this volume, chapters by Joss Moorkens and Piróth and Baker describe the worsening of working conditions for translators, with reference to the still largely unregulated reality of freelancing and crowdsourcing that is an important feature of the new translation economy. Third, automatic or machine translation hides its social origins, the fact that both the translations that are pooled as sources and the technologies themselves are made by human beings. This is what Marx approached in terms of commodity fetishism, referring to the mysterious character of the commodity, which ‘reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of the labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things’ (1990: 164–165). Finally, a new quality of contemporary globalization that Marx could not have foreseen is the geographical dispersion that coexists with the highest level of capital concentration, which is made possible by the new information and communication technologies. If Marx’s workers could meet and organize themselves in the factories to fight for their collective fate, today’s professional translators largely constitute a more evanescent, though no less significant, networked virtual crowd (Cronin 2010). Widely underpaid, isolated and called to compete with the transparent instantaneity of automatic translation, but also commanding over a never before envisaged range of resources through computer-a ssisted translation tools, they are one of globalization’s most paradoxical faces. Nevertheless, from a more heterodox materialist perspective it becomes possible to illuminate the potential of new technologies to be used in radically different ways and, more generally, to reflect on how technology has fundamentally altered the nature of all culture. Today’s widely significant activities of different types of volunteer, fan and activist t ranslators – the blurring of the boundaries between producers and consumers that is often alluded to with the notion of ‘prosumer’ – a re prefigured in Walter Benjamin’s examination of the dynamics that turn viewers into experts and readers into writers, erasing the very distinction between 6

Introduction

author and public (1992, 2005). Furthermore, his perspective is not limited to a consideration of production but also theorizes new forms of perception and reception, made possible not just by the new technical means which facilitate the collective appropriation of works in a state of distraction (most significantly in cinema), but also by the increased participation of the masses in cultural life (Benjamin 1992; Bielsa 2016: 80). Mechanical reproduction allows the emancipation of art from ritual and the politicization of art. It is not a coincidence that Benjamin turned his attention to widely undervalued cultural activities, such as photography and translation, in order to reexamine and critique still dominant notions of cultural authenticity and uniqueness. In this volume, Donald DePalma describes the translation industry in terms of technologydriven language services of outsourced business processes, while Miguel Jimenez- Crespo approaches the dynamics of localization. Chapters by Moorkens, Alonso and Nunes Vieira, and Piróth and Baker explore the social consequences of technological innovations that have become key for translators and translation. Paola Gentile deals with interpreters’ growing concerns on the effects of information and communication technologies for their profession, while Michal Borodo describes different types of grassroots translation projects initiated by fans and activists, as well as top- down crowdsourcing as an increasingly significant area of non-professional translation practice.

Subjective globalization and translation in ordinary people’s lives Globalization does not just refer to increased connectivity in all aspects of social life. As Roland Robertson already observed, ‘Globalization…refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’ ( Robertson 1992: 8). However, as Steger and James argue, the subjective dimensions of globalization have received far less attention than the objective phenomena of time-space compression in the globalization literature (2019: 78). Subjective globalization goes beyond consciousness and reflexivity and involves the most intimate dimensions of our self-perception, as well as our perceptions of others and of the world. It is intricately related to what Ulrich Beck approached in terms of globalization of biography and, later, cosmopolitanization of biography. Globalization of biography indicates generalized mobile individual existence, a transnational life that